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Bringing Nicaragua’s Dictatorship Before the World Court 

The extraordinary political and humanitarian gesture by Spain in response to the crime against Nicaraguan “stateless persons”.

By Carlos F. Chamorro (Confidencial)

HAVANA TIMES – On February 9, 2023, the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship released 222 political prisoners who had endured years of torture and solitary confinement in the prisons of El Chipote and La Modelo in Nicaragua and deported them to the United States. Among those exiled were the seven opposition presidential pre-candidates, imprisoned five months before the November 2021 elections, along with dozens of activists and civic leaders who supported the April 2018 uprising and participated in the national dialogue with the government—an effort crushed by state repression and a police state.

When the “freedom flight” landed at Dulles Airport in Virginia and the released prisoners began disembarking from the OMNI company plane contracted by USAID, a judge from the Managua Court of Appeals read out a decree announcing that the 222 were “traitors to the homeland” and had been stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality, rendering them “stateless.”

In reality, the spurious decree merely carried out the sentence anticipated by dictator Daniel Ortega in November 2021, when he proclaimed himself the winner of a sham election without political competition. In a nationwide broadcast, he lashed out at political prisoners: “They are the sons of bitches of Yankee imperialists,” he shouted, and ordered: “They should be taken to the United States—they are not Nicaraguan, they have no homeland!”

The crime of statelessness as political persecution was rejected by most democratic nations in Latin America and Europe. Amid that widespread condemnation, the Spanish government stood out for its extraordinary political and humanitarian gesture, extending international protection to the Nicaraguan “stateless” by offering them the possibility of acquiring Spanish nationality “by letter of naturalization.”

One week after the first mass decree of “statelessness,” on February 15, 2023, the dictatorship........

© Havana Times